Conservative, conspiracy-laden television network OANN got a significant financial and business boost when they started up from telecom and entertainment giant AT&T, which was looking for a right-wing alternative to complement Fox News, a new report from Reuters details.
OANN owner Robert Herring Sr. testified in a 2019 court case that he decided to launch OANN (which stands for One America News Network) after listening to AT&T executives. “They told us they wanted a conservative network,” Herring said during a 2019 deposition seen by Reuters. “They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other [leftwing] side. When they said that, I jumped to it and built one.”
According to the report, OANN gets about 90% of its revenue from home subscription fees paid to it by AT&T for providing the station to households via its DirecTV satellite service or its cable providers. Herring own corporate accountant once said that if it weren’t for AT&T, the value of the network would be “zero.”